Western Field Ornithologists will hold its annual meeting in San Mateo, California, this fall. Our Saturday evening banquet will feature keynote speaker Carla Cicero of UC Berkeley, whose topic will be The Grinnell Resurvey Project: A Century of Avifaunal Change in California. Full-day field trips on Thursday and Sunday will visit Point Reyes, Half Moon Bay, the Hayward Shoreline, and the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory’s hawk monitoring site in the Marin Headlands. Shearwater Journeys will offer two different pelagic trips in conjunction with the WFO meeting, one trip departing from Bodega Bay (north of San Francisco) on Thursday, October 9, and one trip departing from Santa Cruz (south of San Mateo) on Monterey Bay on Sunday, October 12. Fall is the peak of the seabird migration and also a great time to see a variety of marine mammals. There will be a $30 discount for WFO members on each trip.



Our half-day field trips will be within 30 minutes of the hotel, allowing a little extra sleep on Friday and Saturday. Coyote Point, Redwood Shores, and the Palo Alto Baylands should offer excellent looks at migrating and wintering shorebirds. Golden Gate Park will give visitors a taste of birding right in San Francisco. Inland San Mateo County Parks should provide Pacific-slope specialties such as Wrentit and Nuttall’s Woodpecker, plus all 3 nuthatch species.

A variety of workshops will be offered including: use of GPS devices for field work and birding; an ecological transect of the San Mateo peninsula with Alvaro Jaramillo; a hands-on demonstration of the growing power and sophistication of eBird, by Brian Sullivan; field sketching with John Muir Laws; and an overview of the ambitious Bay Area salt marsh restoration project.

The Friday and Saturday afternoon field ornithology science sessions should be filled with exciting new research from active ornithologists from the Bay Area and around the West. Plan on two fascinating sessions. And of course your registration for the conference also includes the welcoming reception, an experts’ sounds panel, and a photographic identification panel. These panels are popular hits every year, and seem to just keep getting better.

Now is not too soon to reserve your room at the San Mateo Marriott. Specify the code “wfowfoa” when making your reservation. Registration for the conference programs and activities will begin June 15. Watch our website ...www.wfo-cbrc.org/ for updates.